For now, youdotcom is my daily driver. Clean interface and no spam. Search results have gotten better over the last year. But I worry that eventually it’s gonna succumb to those sweet ad dollars like the rest. And this from FAQ does very little to allay the concern
> We are currently focused on building the best possible search experience. We will explore monetization ideas in the future, and we look forward to your feedback in that process.
We want to stay free and open to everyone so we will explore private ads (not user dependent, only based on query, not tracking, similar to DDG) and useful monetized apps like youWrite or youImagine (ie stable diffusion).
If there's enough interest, we can also open up a paid account without ads.
Does that allay OPs concerns though? What happens if tracking-based ads are significantly more profitable than private ones (probably the case, based on the huge revenues of Google/Meta)? How high would the paid account fees need to be to offset the ad revenue?
What happens if you.com is very successful and goes public, so that the pressure to squeeze out as much money as possible slowly erodes the original good intention?
(I appreciate that you took the time to respond to this btw, super cool to be able to interact directly! The magic of HN.)
Yea. These are valid concerns.
We care a lot about privacy and are making public statements and commitments to it.
Technically any privacy-focused business (proton, ddg, etc) could pivot and change their mind but the hope is that by starting with those commitments potential future shareholders would understand that the erosion of trust would hurt the brand and not push for it?
> We are currently focused on building the best possible search experience. We will explore monetization ideas in the future, and we look forward to your feedback in that process.